Configuration

Aurora provides an .env file loader that will automatically use the file given it is present on your project folder.

So all the variables defined there will be available to the execution environment through the env() function.

For example, you may use the following code to get the value of the S3_BUCKET variable:

$bucket = env('S3_BUCKET');

Although that is completely valid code, it is not recommended to use directly the env() function. Instead, you should use the Settings service.

The Settings service

The correct way to load and retrieve settings in your application is through the Settings service; with it you will be able to define custom settings, for example to connect to an S3 instance.

First, you need to add your variables in the .env file:

S3_BUCKET=my-bucket
S3_REGION=us-east-2
S3_ACCESS_KEY=AGI8Q5VMLJVCZNZFM7R3
S3_SECRET_KEY=jTMqSIwXuYea8K2JRsQx0M7c54Y26RIsyi1noGKx

Then you need to create an s3.php file in the settings directory, there you will import the variables with the env() function:

return [
    'bucket' => env('S3_BUCKET'),
    'region' => env('S3_REGION'),
    'access_key' => env('S3_ACCESS_KEY'),
    'secret_key' => env('S3_SECRET_KEY')
];

Finally, whenever you need to retrieve one of these values you can do the following:

# Grab the service instance
$settings = resolve(Aurora\Settings\SettingsInterface::class);

# Get the S3 settings
$params = [
    'bucket' = $settings->get('s3.bucket'),
    'region' = $settings->get('s3.region'),
    'access_key' = $settings->get('s3.access_key'),
    'secret_key' = $settings->get('s3.secret_key')
];

# Create the object
$s3 = new S3($params);

There we get the Settings service instance, implemented through SettingsInterface and referenced that way in the Service Container.

The get() method of the SettingsInterface receives two arguments, the first specifies the setting path using dot-notation and the second is an optional default value.

As you will see in the next section, the resolve() function is a shorthand method to resolve services out of the container, but you may instead use dependency injection if you like.

Next up, the Service container.